Intestinal organoids allow researchers to investigate organ development and patient-specific disease pathology; however, building this tissue accurately in vitro poses several challenges. Matthias Lütolf, a principal investigator at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, is interested in engineering biological tissues to solve heterogeneity and reproducibility challenges in organoid systems. In a recently published Science paper,1 his team described how they developed a biomaterial tissue scaffold that allows intestinal stem cells to self-organize into organoids with patterned crypt-like structures. These intestinal organoids contain stem cell and villus compartments that emerge side-by-side during their development and fully recapitulate in vivo tissue.
Intestinal organoids that are classically grown in 3-D matrices are cystic, which means that they have a monolayer of epithelial cells with fluid inside. The cells interact with the matrix on the basal side, and things such as nutrients and drugs interact with the tissue inside the apical surface. Parasitic bacteria and ...
